


A Whole Little World

by PatternsInTheIvy



Series: Through These Eyes [1]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Blade Runner AU, Blade Runner Murdoc, Child Death, Dystopia, Gen, Guilt, Knowledge of Blade Runner is not required, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-Linear Narrative, Replicant Mac, Science Fiction, Self-Worth Issues, This one got a little bit metaphysical, writing challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29989218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PatternsInTheIvy/pseuds/PatternsInTheIvy
Summary: In all ways not intellectual, he couldn’t help but remember the blonde boy who had never been, sitting on the porch and waiting for his father. The earthy smell of the rain still triggered those images and words, even if he tried to escape them.Mac, a replicant who starts to develop inappropriate emotions, experiences a traumatic event that leads him to fail his next baseline test. As it happens to all replicants who become damaged, he is marked for retirement.[You don't need to have watchedBlade Runnerto understand this story.]
Series: Through These Eyes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2205978
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: r/Darkfics Monthly Prompt Challenge





	A Whole Little World

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven’t watched any of the BR movies, the only things you need to know before going in are: **1) replicants are bioengineered beings who look like normal humans but have superior intelligence, strength, resistance, agility, resilience, etc; 2) they are born already adults, so their emotional landscape supposedly differs from that of a human; 3) blade runners are those hired to take out replicants that go rogue.**
> 
> There are additional warnings in the end notes if you want to check them.

Countless digital outdoors above cast a colorful glow on the street. It shifted from a pink to a blue hue, and then to green. There wasn’t a pattern that Mac could identify in those colors—maybe there hadn’t been a repetition yet, or maybe he was just unable to process the intricacies. 

That wasn’t important now. 

Deep bruises and the open wounds made him move slower than he normally would have; his left leg dragged a bit behind him, and sometimes he had to use the wall to support his weight and push himself forward—he still had to keep going, the need to hide and flee the only one he was aware of—even when one of his hands was kept pressed tightly against his side in a vain attempt to stanch the bleeding there.

A light rain started to fall and he felt the water running down from the top of his head, passing through his forehead and cheeks and, finally, reaching his mouth. It tasted like iron.

After a few minutes, he finally ducked inside a badly lit alley, walking until he found a corner where he could hide. The darkness there contrasted against the bright lights from before. 

Sliding against the wall, he tried not to put his weight on his bad leg, and sat down, shaking his head to get the hair out of his eyes. That motion made him feel dizzy, which was, admittedly, a new thing. Mac had never been this damaged before.

He looked up, taking a deep breath and trying to stop that strange, disconcerting sensation, or the way it made his stomach feel heavy. His eyes focused on the faint yellow glow up in the sky, which was due to the amount of light in a city like LA—the ads, the car headlights, sometimes entire buildings, and even the people wore shining accessories—combined with the ever-present industrial smoke.

It was almost like there was a veil, blocking everything beyond.

Mac remembered the stories about how years in the past people could still see the stars shining. He wished he could have lived during those times, when artificiality didn’t block out the natural lights. He’d memorized sky charts, the names of constellations, even the legends behind them. Had the sky not been starless that night, he would have been able to look at many of the bright points and tell their names, their distance from Earth, and whether or not they had died already—gone in a violent blaze of radiation.

The muscles of his left arm protested, having been locked in the same position against his right side for some time now, and he shifted, a hiss escaping him when the movement pulled at the wounds. Switching, he pressed his right hand tightly against his side and stretched his legs in front of him. His left hand rested, palm up, on his thigh. He felt so tired, like his body weighed much more than he could carry.

He needed urgent repairing, but he couldn’t have that, not with the entire LAPD, or a blade runner, on his tail. Mac had escaped the first blade runner sent after him, but he was pretty sure that they would send another—and, besides, he was pretty sure that he hadn’t killed that first one, so he might be closer to Mac than expected.

Not that any of that would matter, not with how much he was bleeding.

If he were a human, he’d be way past clinging to these artificial last minutes. Perhaps that single fact answered the many questions he had whirling through his mind during these last months, and that sounded even louder now. Perhaps not.

Now that the dizziness and nausea had abated, he looked down, and the faint light made the blood on his hand shine, and he stared at it, transfixed by how real it looked—how it looked just like  _ hers _ .

He bled, he shivered, he felt hunger and thirst—and many other things that he couldn’t name—he desired and hoped for things. Did not that make him human? His life was there, quite literally slipping through his fingers, red and hot, and he still had to ask himself that question. Why was that so?

Well, it wasn’t like the answer mattered, not for him, at least. What he was stopped mattering ever since he failed the baseline test. In a way, just the fact that he had to go through that test was proof that it had never mattered. Mac knew that his future had been sealed once his answers to the poem showed how defective he was being. 

Too human and emotional to pass the test, and yet, condemned to never be considered anything more than a mere copycat. 

The chill of the night seeped through the fabric of his wet clothes, and the gentle breeze made him shiver. Another source of coldness, insidious and powerful, made itself known from within. It was almost strange to feel that, considering how much his leg and his side burned.

Petrichor permeated the air, and it reminded him of a day in a distant past that hadn’t existed.

He fished inside his pocket, looking for the swiss army knife that he always kept on himself. The memories associated with the object always brought him comfort, they were the closest thing he had to something or someone to ward off the loneliness that kept him company most of the time. 

If he closed his eyes, he would be able to see a middle-aged man—his grandfather—giving him that knife. It had been his tenth birthday, and his father had left… grandpa had been trying to comfort him. It was an unfair memory, and he would have rathered something different, if he could choose things like that.

Mac didn’t remember the face of his father, everything about the man was just blurs and shadows that carved a void inside him. He didn’t know if the absence there was even close to real, or if it was a byproduct of the incompleteness of his fabricated past.

Intellectually, he was perfectly capable of understanding that those memories were false, nothing more than a sophisticated but artificial past, put together bit by bit, image by image and implanted into his brain. Even if those years past felt as real as his memories of dinner yesterday, no one had lived through those. Still, they made him who—not what—he was. Even if that rainy afternoon when he got the gift never existed, that knife still was his most cherished possession—Mac had bought it in an antique store, using part of his first payment, and that was the part that tainted the memory, and so he liked to pretend it had never happened.

In all ways not intellectual, he couldn’t help but remember the blonde boy who had never been, sitting on the porch and waiting for his father. The earthy smell of the rain still triggered those images and words, even if he tried to escape them.

He closed his hand around the swiss army knife, feeling the comforting touch of the metal.

Attachment had been his ruin, in a way. Or, not the attachment itself, but the awareness of it. A bit like in the story he’d read about a rebel angel who found out that he wanted to be like his creator—as a punishment, he was cast away from paradise. 

In his greed, Mac had started to desire for more than the meager spots of kindness that could be called his own personal heaven. 

At one point, he understood what was happening, and in a remarkable display of lack of self-control, he’d let it continue. From impressions to worded questions, and then, to the timid search for answers. Maybe those things had always been there, and he had never had a chance of fighting against them.

But his blessings did not extend to the fallout of finding out that his self-image maybe did not correspond to the disposable quality that others assigned him, or the way he’d started to see the distance between his nature and humanity shorten. Yesterday proved that.

_ He was the one who found her body—a thin crimson thread was the first clue, it came from below the debris. _

_ With one hand, Mac lifted the wall that had fallen, its metallic foundations coming up dripping with blood, and there she was. For long moments, he could only stare—even though he had expected to find death, he hadn’t been prepared for such a small body. _

_ The girl had been far away from the explosion—there was still a body, after all—but that distance hadn’t been sufficient for her to escape its fury.  _

_ She was small, and her frailty was exacerbated by how lifeless she already looked, the only movement at all was that of her dark hair, blowing in the wind. A child that wouldn’t ever grow up—if only Mac had gotten there faster, maybe that girl’s fate would have been different…  _

  
  


Mac had done his job after that—he had analyzed the perimeter, trying to find clues about the bomb that had been used and trace it back to an extremist group. But he hadn’t been able to get the image out of his mind, it followed him back to headquarters and to the moment of his post-assignment baseline test.

_ Mac was sitting, staring ahead, focused at one fixed point on the white wall, waiting for the tester to begin reciting the poem. He felt tense, the muscles of his shoulders locked taut and painfully, even as his fingers moved—so much that he had to ball them into fists to stop. _

_ “When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay.” _

_ “When I’d just turned eleven,” that girl had not been eleven, she’d been younger—so small, fragile, moreso than the other humans, “as I lay.” _

_ “Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy.” _

_ “Prone on the floor,” he remembered the sight of destruction, the smell of smoke and burnt flesh… “and watched a clockwork toy,” but people were not like clockworks, repairable.  _

_ Mac’s own repairability was limited. _

_ “A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy.” _

_ “...pushed by a tin boy.” _

_ There was just a second of hesitation before the tester spoke again. Mac didn’t need to hear it, he knew he’d failed it, had known he would fail even before the start. _

_ “You are very far from baseline. We’ll do this again.” _

_ His racing heart and irregular breath rhythm told him that repeating the test was useless. He opened his hands, let his fingers pick at the hems of his shirt. _

Failing a test meant retirement—and he didn’t know if that euphemism was ironic, mocking, or if maybe, execution was too much for the fragile sensibilities of humans. If the thing they killed bled, if it ran away, flinched in fear, was it still a thing? 

Perhaps, before this newfound sentiment—dare he call it humanity, even?—he wouldn’t have minded retirement too much. But now he couldn’t accept the idea of dying that way, like he didn’t matter.

He wanted to find out if he did.

Mac wanted to go to new places, discover different things, see for himself all those things, experience them—would those experiences, filtered through his eyes and impressions, be unique in a sea of other ones?

What did it mean that when he failed the test, in those precious minutes after, Alfred Peña—his supervisor—pulled him to the side, handed him his own access card, and told him to run away?

_ “I’m sorry, Mac,” Al said, “I can’t do more than this,” he gestured at the card in Mac’s hands, “you run away and don’t look back.” _

_ Then Al turned around, rummaging through the drawers, cabinets and shelves. They were filled with clutter, and to anyone else, those discarded and random parts would look just like useless things, but for them, those were precious tools to use when they needed to investigate traps and bombs left in the outskirts of the city by terrorists.  _

_ Peña ended up picking a bottle of whisky. _

_ “It’s good whisky, but that will make this more believable, yeah, this will work,” he said, holding the bottle as if he was trying to measure its weight. _

_ “Work for what?” Mac asked. _

_ “To crack against my head,” when Mac didn’t answers, Al tilted his head, an almost humorous expression on his face, “come on, I can’t let people know that I helped you.” _

_ Mac blinked, surely Al didn’t want him to do that? He could modulate his strength, but still, it was  _ so easy _ for a replicant to kill a human. Mac had never attempted anything against a human, but he knew that it would take almost no effort. _

_ “I wouldn’t do this,” Mac said. He’d meant to say that he wasn’t going to, but just the idea that he would… it shouldn’t, but just that made indignation flare inside him. _

_ Al gave Mac a look—half-sad, half-angry—and shook his head, “nobody is going to doubt that you did it, kid” _

_ Mac stared at the card, opened his mouth, but he knew that he couldn’t argue against that. It was the root of all problems, wasn’t it?  _

_ “I know you wouldn’t,” Peña added. _

_ That made Mac look up. He wanted to say something in answer to that, but no words would come.  _

_ “I wouldn’t help you otherwise.  _ Now go _.” _

_ Mac did. He gave Peña a firm nod, and then turned away and left, never looking back. _

Why did Al do that? Just because they’d worked side by side for more than a year? Many people worked with replicants, but none of them would go as far as helping one escape—you don’t worry about a tool, after all, not as long as you can use it, or have the resources to replace it in case it becomes defective. 

When Peña trained Mac on how to spot and deal with explosives, he used to say that Mac needed to look at things for what they were, and not for what they seemed to be. He now wondered if Al was only talking about bombs, or if maybe, just maybe there was something more in those words… 

And now, Mac hadn’t even thanked him He’d just left. If he were human, would he have turned around and shown how grateful he was? Would he know how to?

He’d run and disappeared into the night, and when he heard the sirens that signalized his escape, the sound was muffled by the distance and dozens of buildings in the way. Luckily, the LAPD headquarters were very close to the least hospitable parts of the city—the parts where all those who did the undesirable work lived. Mac knew those places like the back of his hand.

Unfortunately, that hadn’t been enough to deter an experienced blade runner, as the three bullets lodged inside him attested to. 

If he could have gone home, he would have been able to heal the injury very quickly. But he couldn’t. And he knew that there would be an alert sent to every establishment where he’d be able to buy supplies, and he couldn’t get to any place where he’d be caught on cameras. It wasn’t even likely that his cards would still work… 

And the worst part was that soon there would be another blade runner after him. Another replicant. Mac was one of the latest Nexus models, and nowadays retirement was done by other replicants, not only because killing sometimes made humans uneasy, but because no human, no matter how well trained, would be able to take replicants in combat. And sure, they were genetically engineered to be more compliant and less likely to disobey a human, but it wasn't like someone could count on that in cases of rogue replicants.

Stories of replicants who had escaped and that lived distant from the big cities were not many, but they were always present, told from mouth to mouth, overheard in the shadows—or, that was Mac’s experience with them. 

A complete normal life was impossible for him, his very existence prevented that, but… 

The rain had gotten stronger now, the louder noise of water hitting the ground pulled him out of the reveries that were sure to follow… 

Instead, his mind went to what had happened earlier—not even an hour ago, but it still felt like a long time had passed. 

_ As soon as Mac saw him, he knew that he had been found. He couldn’t point out what exactly how he knew that. But he was a hundred percent sure that the man, dressed in a dark and long leather coat, his dark eyes zeroing on Mac even in the crowd, was the blade runner who’d been sent after him. _

_ Just as predicted, Mac could tell that the man was a replicant—an older model, but that didn’t really mean that Mac had any edge in this. _

_ Being found now, when he was just getting close to a way out of the city, hurt a bit. Wasting no time, Mac bolted, wanting to get as far away as possible from other people—the bounty hunter might not care that there were others around, and Mac wanted to avoid anyone else getting hurt. _

_ He’d run through the labyrinthic streets and alleys of the district, the blade runner on his heels at every turn. At the one point that Mac thought he had foiled the other, making him lost the trail, he was surprised by the man appearing ahead of him, at the end of the street Mac had been running to. Without other options, he entered a restaurant, throwing all the unnocuppied tables and chairs as he passed by. The customers all became agitated, a couple of them running, a few screaming. _

_ Just as he ducked inside the kitchen, he saw the blade runner enter the restaurant too. There were two cooks there working on the dishes. _

_ “Run!” Mac said, “get out!” he pushed the man closer to the door out of the kitchen, “go.” _

_ Both men did run away, probably recognizing that Mac was a replicant, and preferring not be there for whatever was going to happen. As he heard the steps outside approaching, he hid behind a counter. _

_ The smell of sesame oil was intense, and it was almost like Mac could taste the grease in the air. Keeping down, Mac paid attention to the sounds and to the way the shadows shifted on the floor and walls as the bounty-hunter walked, searching for him. _

_ “Have you ever been through a Voight-Kampff test?” the blade runner asked, throwing Mac off a little with the complete irrelevant question, “no, I don’t think you have,” he added after a few seconds. _

_ He wasn’t wrong. Mac had never needed to go through a VK test—there was no doubt about his nature, and thus, no need to subject him to all those questions meant to gauge empathy to tell him apart from a human. But Mac knew what a Voight-Kampff entailed, even if he didn’t know any of specific questions.  _

_ “So many questions, you know… for example: there is a spider in front of you, its back is glued to adhesive tape, legs moving helplessly as its body twitches trying to get free, what do you do?” _

_ Mac looked around, his mind was going through all the things that he could use to get out of this, and only a little bit of his attention focused on the question. _

_ “Do you know what I answered?” _

_ Well, Mac really didn’t want to know that. He was much more interested in finding out how to escape. Each time the other spoke, the blade runner’s voice was a bit closer. _

_ “I said I’d remove all the legs from the spider, one by one—” _

_ The blade runner kept talking, but Mac’s attention went to the electric cables above, and then to the canisters of gas that were used on the stoves, right in front of him. And about seven feet away, to his left, there was a window. In a second, Mac could envision how he was going to escape. _

_ “You don’t seem like the type who would answer that,” he continued, “no, you look like a good boy, one who would try to give a proper, nice answer. Isn’t that right? Maybe you would even believe in the words you’d say. I know the type—and you all die, in the end.” _

_ Well, regardless of what Mac wanted to be, he knew that he wouldn’t have answered something like that. He  _ would _ probably say that he’d set the spider free—not that it mattered.  _

_ “But it doesn’t matter what answer you would give in a test like that, you will never be human—so why not just embrace what you are?” _

_ Was that why this man—this replicant—worked on this? Was that why he hunted others? Some way of “embracing his nature”? _

_ It didn’t matter what Mac was, but it mattered  _ to him _ that he wouldn’t ever be like that. He felt like there was a lot about himself to discover, but he knew that this callous disregard displayed by the other was an antithesis of whatever he wanted to be. _

_ A shadow approached, and then Mac moved. He took his swiss army knife, pulling the larger blade out. He held the object in his hand and, feeling the perfect distribution of weight, flung it at the electrical cables. The knife spun in the air and hit the cable, cutting it and making part of it swing near one of the stoves—the tip sparking. _

_ Mac wasted no time, and threw himself ahead, one hand grabbing a gas canister, while he ducked and reached his knife with the other. Then he ran and jumped out of the window. Concentrated on the next steps of his plan, he barely felt the glass cutting the skin just below his hairline. He was still falling when he punched the canister and threw it inside, in the direction of the cables he’d cut.  _

_ He didn’t feel pain, but he felt the impact of the bullets hitting him while he was still in the air, the bounty-hunter had a snarl on his face as he emptied an entire magazine in Mac’s direction. Then his senses were assaulted by the explosion—orange heat, deafening noise, and the acrid smell.  _

_ A curtain of fire blocked his vision inside, just before the ceiling collapsed. The shockwave propelled him further away from the window, a grunt escaping his lips when he hit the ground violently. His ears were ringing, and for a few seconds, he felt like he would lose the battle against disorientation. But Mac pushed himself up, and he stumbled just once as he ran away. _

His hands were shaking, and he didn’t think all of that was because of the cold. Well, he knew it wasn’t, not when it was accompanied by exhaustion that seemed to reach his bones, his racing heart, and how clammy his skin felt. 

And despite that, a contradictory wave of calm and peace hit him. Mac thought, briefly, that he should ignore those and try to stand up, to go on… search for repairment. But even the idea of moving tired him, and right now it felt like he only had the energy to think, and to remember… 

He’d heard the expression of “life flashing before your eyes,” and it did describe what was happening in a semi-accurate way, although “flash” was, perhaps, a too lively word for the dragging of memory after memory, invoking and being invoked by one question or another that flew through his mind. He kept staring at the sky, blinking slowly as he felt his eyelids grow heavy, and Mac couldn’t decide if he found the sleepy sensation traitorous or comforting. Either way, he didn’t fight against it.

As he closed his eyes, there was one stray thought that he was aware of: did dying here and now mean that a whole little world would end with him?

He would like to think so.

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warning: major character death (yeah, and this is a series. I promise I plan to solve that in a smart way in the next installments.)
> 
> The poem lines quoted during the baseline test are from _Pale Fire_ by Vladimir Nabokov. 
> 
> This was written for the March Darkfic Writing Challenge on r/DarkFics. I used the prompts:  
> Word: “glow”.  
> Sentence: _“Sometimes I stare at a door or a wall and I wonder what is this reality, why am I alive, and what is this all about?”_
> 
> I blame this fic on a BR2049 rewatch. Luv kiiiiinda reminds me of Murdoc (or vice-versa, idk), plus David Dastmalchian is in the movie too, so I couldn’t stop those fanfic gears from turning, you know?


End file.
